Position in chronology
OSP 1, 026
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Nippur, roughly the mid-third millennium BCE — one of the oldest kinds of paperwork there is: a barley ration list. A temple or household administrator records standard grain allotments (one barig each, about 60 liters) to named men, then tallies dependent laborers — elderly women, weavers, and small children of both sexes — grouped under overseers such as Lugal-saga. Documents like this show how large Sumerian institutions fed and tracked their workforce down to the youngest child.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a payroll sheet in barley. Three men — Lugal-ennu, E-lu, and Girini — each receive one barig of grain (about 60 liters). After a broken stretch, the list turns to dependent workers: five elderly women and one little girl, entered under the overseer Lugal-saga, plus a person or entry called An-da-še. The reverse continues with female weavers, a small amount of barley measured in shekels, someone whose name ends in '-meza', and closing tallies of boys and girls — the numbers themselves are lost to damage. The gaps in between are broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 barig (of barley): Lugal-ennu. 1 barig: E-lu. 1 barig: Girini. (Break) 5 old women (worn-out female workers), 1 female child: (under) Lugal-saga. An-da-še. (Break) [...] female weaver(s), [...] shekel(s) of barley, [...] ...-meza, [x] male [children], [x female] children.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
1(barig@c) lugal-en-nu 1(barig@c) e-lu2 1(barig@c) giri3-ni [...] 5(asz@c) geme2 szu-gi4 1(asz@c) sza3-du10 munus lugal-sa6-ga an-da-sze [...] munus usz#-bar [...] gin2 sze [...] x-me-za [x sza3-du10?] nita [x sza3]-du10# munus
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — OSP 1, 026. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P216093) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.